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When Neelab Kanishka fled Afghanistan for Pakistan with her family in 1989 at the age of 11, the idea of ever returning to her war-torn native land seemed far-fetched.
She could not have conceived in her wildest imagination, Kanishka said, that 15 years later she'd not only be coming back, but also directing one of the nation's largest employers. Nor would she have envisioned her role as envoy of a discount Internet retailer located in, of all places, Salt Lake City.
"I can't say it's a dream come true, because I don't think I could have had a dream like this 17 years ago," said Kanishka, who moved to the United States from Pakistan in 1997 with her husband, a former childhood friend who had been working in the States.
The couple settled in Salt Lake City, where Kanishka later took a job as a customer service rep for Overstock.com, a site specializing in product liquidations. After little more than a year on the job, she took over management of the website's Worldstock division, which sells handmade goods.
These days, Worldstock employs more than 1,500 Afghan artisans among a worldwide network of craft workers. It's an accomplishment that Overstock's CEO, Patrick Byrne, attributes to both an upswing in online retail spending and reliable demand for inexpensive handmade rugs.
That confluence of factors culminated this week in a confirmation by the Afghan Ministry of Commerce that Overstock is currently the largest provider of private employment in Afghanistan. According to Mariam Nawabi, commercial attaché for the Afghan Embassy in the United States, Overstock is currently believed to provide employment, directly or indirectly, for about 1,700 people living in Afghanistan.
Prior to Overstock's arrival, Byrne was told that the country's largest employer was a brick factory in the Western city of Herat, which had about 400 workers.
"That was the (General Electric) of Afghanistan before we got there," said Byrne, who traveled to Afghanistan in March. "Now we're the GE."
Byrne's operation in Afghanistan is strictly low-tech. The company's suppliers largely work from home. Their chief products are rugs, embroidery, jewelry and fur-lined clothing.
Afghanistan is one of more than 30 countries that sell handmade goods for Overstock, and it is currently the site's largest foreign supplier. Rugs, according to Kanishka, are the top-selling item, ranging in price from around $200 to $1,700.
Overstock isn't the only one attempting to profit online by selling handmade goods from exotic locations. Competitors include retailers specializing in single-product categories as well as sites like Novica, an online venture backed by the National Geographic Society that sells crafts from a network of more than 2,000 artists around the globe.
The principle behind the business, said Roberto Milk, Novica's co-founder and chief executive, is to give people who traditionally sold their wares only at markets near their homes a chance to reach a much bigger group of potential buyers.
"For people who work with us, their economic situation changes because they have an ongoing way to sell to the world market," Milk said.
But Novica isn't a nonprofit venture. Milk estimates that the site's revenues are growing at a rate of 30 percent annually and he expects it to become profitable in the second half of the year.
Like Worldstock, Novica's wares span several continents. Suppliers include leatherworkers from the Andes, carvers from West Africa, basket weavers from Bali and Java, and painters from all locations.
Other online retailers are venturing even farther off the beaten path to seek out handmade goods.
Pete Burris, president and namesake of Alpaca Pete's, a retail chain and website that sells rugs and clothes made from the woolly South American alpaca, buys finished products almost exclusively from a group of about 4,000 Peruvians from the island of Amantani, located in the middle of Lake Titicaca, the highest-elevation lake in the world. Aside from a small tourism business, Burris says, his Alpaca exports constitute one of the only local sources of employment.
In Afghanistan, Kaniskha's network of suppliers consists largely of women who were prevented from working outside their homes under the Taliban regime. These days, many of these women make substantially more money than men.
Given the disparity between prevailing wages in developed and developing nations, both Overstock's Byrne and Novica's Milk say their goal is not to get the lowest possible price for handmade goods.
At Novica, Milk said, artists themselves set wholesale prices for the retailer, which are usually at least slightly higher than local prices.
On its website, Overstock says that it will not make a profit of more than 1 percent on goods sold through its Worldstock division. In practice, Byrne said, this translates into artisans receiving about $70 from every $100 customers spend on their wares.
By American standards, earnings for suppliers of handmade goods don't seem like much to rejoice about. Kanishka cites the example of one mother and six daughters who make about $400 a month embroidering shawls.
In Afghanistan, where government workers commonly earn less than $40 a month, Kanishka insists, "that's big money."
